1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to semiconductor device and more particularly, to the semiconductor device including E-fuse array.
2. Related Art
Semiconductor devices may be regarded as failed devices if at least one of memory cell included in each of the semiconductor devices abnormally operates. As the semiconductor devices become more highly integrated, the number of failed devices has continuously increased. Thus, the semiconductor devices may be designed to include redundancy cells. That is, if a defect of the semiconductor device is found, a repair operation may replace defected cells with the redundancy cells. The semiconductor device may store information on the defected cells therein to execute the repair operation.
Each of the semiconductor devices may be designed to include fuses that store information necessary for various internal control operations, for example, the information on the defected cells. Conventional fuses can be programmed in at wafer level because a logic level of each data is determined according to an electrical open/short state of each fuse. However, once the semiconductor devices are encapsulated to form semiconductor packages, it may be impossible to program the conventional fuses in the semiconductor packages. E-fuses are widely used to solve the aforementioned disadvantage. Each of the e-fuses may be realized using a transistor, for example, a nonvolatile memory (NVM) cell transistor having a floating gate or a charge trapping layer. In such a case, a data may be stored in the e-fuse by programming or erasing the transistor to change a threshold voltage of the transistor. That is, the e-fuse may be considered to be an electrical open or short according to a resistance value between a source and a drain of the transistor employed as the e-fuse.
In order to correctly recognize the data stored in the e-fuses, a size of the transistors employed as the e-fuses has to be increased or amplifiers have to be used without increasing the size of the transistors employed as the e-fuses. However, in any case, there may be limitations in increasing the integration density of the semiconductor devices including the e-fuses.
Recently, e-fuse arrays have been proposed to solve the limitations of the integration density and to store the information necessary for various internal control operations. In the event that the e-fuse arrays are employed in the semiconductor devices, the e-fuse arrays may share the amplifiers with each other. Accordingly, the integration density of the semiconductor devices may be improved.